1. Field of the Invention
The embodiments of the invention generally relate to identifying failures within a communications network and more particularly to systems and methods that search for failures from both the sender side and the recipient side and that identify possible failed nodes before reporting the communications failure, so that both the failure and the possible source of the failure can be reported together.
2. Description of Related Art
Within networked applications the connection between two parties (e.g., a sender and a recipient) can fail for some reason unknown to either of the parties. In business critical applications, loss of connectivity often means the business ceases to function as it should with the resulting loss of revenue as a result.
Often at the application layer (for example a Java™ Application, Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc., in the United States, other countries, or both) the failure manifests itself as a very simplistic exception (e.g. an IOException in Java™) which effectively tells the application nothing more than “something has broken”. This can (and does) lead in extreme cases to each party blaming the other for the loss of connection, particularly if a service level agreement (SLA) of some kind is in place between the two.
Similarly, problem determination can be hard to focus, particularly if the connection is formed by a route over a number of hops, for example a LAN in a data centre, a public WAN such as the Internet, and so on. The embodiments described below help narrow the failure possibilities to help better identify the broken point in the connection.